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Rising from my bed in the Bachelor enlisted quarters, I stood and stretched. Today's the day, I thought. My last day in the Marine Corps. It had been twenty years ago when the door on a Greyhound bus opened and some guy with a Smokey the Bear hat stepped onboard and told a bunch of us that we had three heartbeats to get off his damned bus. I remembered that day as if it were yesterday. There were 26 of us on the bus and we all hustled to get off. The guy in the Smokey hat was joined by three others, all yelling orders at the same time; all with a common tone and theme. "Fall in!" "Line up!" "Stand on those yellow footprints!" That day had been a jarring introduction to the Marine Machine. In a way, it was the day my life really started. I was barely seventeen, just a week out of high school, tall and kind of gangly. I remember being as disoriented as the rest of the guys on the bus. The ride onto the island had been quiet, as we watched the salt marsh give way to the oaks and pines. Then a couple of turns brought us onto a road illuminated with orange street lights and we were thrust into noisy, confused chaos. Whatever one of the drill instructors ordered me to do, I did. My dad had been a Marine, as had his dad before him. So, 1 guess I wasn't quite as disoriented as some of the guys. "Follow your last order first," Pap had told me on the day I left for boot camp. "In everything you do, especially your marriage." It'd been a great ride, these last twenty years. But now I was ready to move on with my life. I'd given more than half of it to the Corps. I'd had the opportunity to lead and be led by some of the greatest people I'd ever known. The years of service and the requisite deployments and transfers had taken their toll. My first marriage had lasted six-and-a-half years, and we'd had two beautiful daughters. I'd been present for only one of their births. Sandy left me when I was deployed to Panama. My second marriage had lasted only nine months but thankfully, there were no kids produced with that shrew. I'd been shot at and blown up, but I'd survived. CONTINUE READING ↓